


Falling

by leaveanote



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Aziraphale Loves Crowley (Good Omens), First Kiss, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Kissing, Light Angst, Love Confessions, M/M, Rough Kissing, Sexy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-28 18:24:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19399819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leaveanote/pseuds/leaveanote
Summary: In the weeks after Armageddon didn’t happen, Crowley’s seemed overly exhausted and strangely jumpy. Aziraphale soon realizes the demon needs to sleep, and hasn’t been able to. Aziraphale’s sure it’s the aftermath of confronting Satan, or that Crowley really does care about the world and can’t believe how close they came to losing it — but the truth that they’re both going to have to confront is, Crowley hasn’t been able to sleep since he thought Aziraphale was dead...A little bit of angst, gets a little sexy by the end, and 100% ineffable fluff.





	Falling

“You know, you’ve been looking awfully peaky lately.” Aziraphale peers at Crowley over the top of his book. “I know you don’t like it very often, but I think you could do with some sleep. Do you think perhaps you’d like to go home and get some rest?”

Crowley’s drinking his way through his fifth or fifteen bottle of cheap wine, not wanting to waste Aziraphale’s good stuff on a bad mood.

“D’you want me to leave, angel?” His voice is ragged, but not in the rather pleasant, roguish way it gets when he’s been drinking (though Aziraphale won’t tell him how much he likes that voice, Crowley drinks quite enough without the encouragement). Instead it’s...pained, and more exhausted than Aziraphale’s used to hearing.

“Well no, of course I don’t want you to leave,” Aziraphale finds himself saying. It still feels rather rebellious to admit this, but after actively rebelling against Heaven and Hell and the Plan, Aziraphale sees little point in hiding the simple statement of truth. Something in Crowley’s jaw twitches. “It’s just that I suppose you haven’t been home in — my, nearly four days? And even then you were only gone a couple hours...”

“So?”

Aziraphale closes his book. 

“It just seems like you could do with some rejuvenation, is all, though I’m not sure what you need exactly.” Aziraphale racks his brain for ideas, but he’s never encountered an exhausted demon, of course, so he can only think of human comforts. “Would you like me to go out and get you some food? Some soup, perhaps?” He goes to grab his jacket and makes for the door of the shop. “Yes, I think it’s for the best if we get something into you, and then you’ll be —“

He stops. Crowley has stood up abruptly and stands in front of him, hands shoved in his pockets, staring through his glasses at the ground. 

“Don’t,” he says, so softly Aziraphale’s not sure he’s heard him right. 

“What’s that?” Aziraphale notices, to his bewilderment, that Crowley seems to be shaking, and it looks like his hands in his pockets are balled into fists.

“Don’t go,” Crowley says. He gives a shudder, and Aziraphale knows he’s sobered up, this isn’t a drunken stupor. “Please...don’t go, angel.” 

All traces of alcohol are gone from his voice, but it’s even more hoarse than it was. 

“Crowley?” asks Aziraphale. He has never, ever seen the demon like this. He puts a tentative hand on Crowley’s shoulder, and Crowley flinches, but doesn’t pull away. “I won’t. I’m not going anywhere, okay?” Crowley doesn’t move. “D’you want to have a lie down on the be—?”

“No,” Crowley says, a little too emphatically. Aziraphale thinks he’s starting to get a sense of what this is about. 

“Okay,” he says gently, “all right, darling. Would you sit on the couch with me?”

He thinks he hears a murmur that sounds a bit like I’m not a damn child, I’m hellfire and brimstone, but it’s barely audible and Crowley’s already headed through the shop to Aziraphale’s apartment. Aziraphale miracles the door open before Crowley gets to it, and when Crowley gets inside, he collapses on the sofa with his head in his hands. Aziraphale ensures all the doors are locked before settling in next to him. He puts a tentative arm around Crowley’s shoulders, but in the next moment, Crowley’s stretched out, lying with his head in Aziraphale’s lap. 

Aziraphale gingerly removes Crowley’s glasses and places them on the side table. Crowley doesn’t protest, and when Aziraphale, almost on instinct, begins running his fingers through the demon’s hair, he even gives a quiet moan of pleasure. 

Crowley’s hair is quite soft. As they sit there, in each other’s company, only the sounds of their vestigial breathing between them, Aziraphale wonders, vaguely, if he’s ever been happier in his life. Probably not, not ever, though Hamlet was a very close second. 

“I take it you’ve been having trouble sleeping,” he says at last. Loath as Aziraphale is to disrupt the peace, he can see, almost feel the tension lining the demon’s frame. Crowley needs to talk about it, and he’s likely not going to start the conversation himself. 

“You could say that,” Crowley says after a moment, his eyes closed. 

“I know it was terribly shocking, all of that, what with Satan and your awful trial and all.” Aziraphale gives a little shudder just thinking about it. “It’s over, darling. And we’re safe now.” He is really very much enjoying the sensation of Crowley’s hair threading through his fingers. It’s terribly intimate, and Crowley is so rarely this...vulnerable...

Aziraphale’s brow furrows just as Crowley’s eyes flash open.

“That’s what you think this is, angel?” He sits up, his hair such a teased-out mess from Aziraphale’s hands that Aziraphale almost giggles, but stops himself at the distraught look on Crowley’s face. “That I can’t get to bed because I’m wound up from our encounter with the apocalypse?!” 

“Well — whatever is it, then?”

There’s a muscle in Crowley’s jaw working, his eyes are bright. He pulls one leg up to the couch, sets it back down, then pulls it up again, leaning it against the back of the couch. He worries his bottom lip with his teeth. Aziraphale is bursting to demand an answer, but the air between them is taut and charged, he knows he needs to let Crowley come to it in his own time. 

“I thought I had lost you.” He’s very focused on a spot somewhere over Aziraphale’s left ear. The magnitude of this statement is too much for Aziraphale to handle; this, he was not expecting. 

“You mean — “

“I thought I lost you!” Crowley’s eyes flash to his, just for an instant before darting away, and they’re bright and brimming with tears. “In the fire! I know you were busy getting discorporated and threatened by those Heavenly bastards and all, but I thought — I really thought — “

He gives a great, shuddering breath, and the tears spill over; he makes a move as to scrub them furiously away, but then just lets them fall, dropping his fists to his lap. 

It’s this gesture, perhaps more than anything, that makes Aziraphale understand just how seriously he means it. There’s something about the motion — it’s not helpless, exactly, Crowley never is, but it’s the absence of any pretense or bravado: just raw, encompassing grief and terror. 

For him. 

After all these centuries of Aziraphale trying to push him away, to tell Crowley how much he didn’t need him...he had never questioned, not really, why Crowley kept coming back...

He’d never questioned it because of course he hadn’t ever wanted Crowley to stop coming back, but he didn’t have to admit that to himself because Crowley was always there.

And then Crowley had found the bookshop on fire, and — 

“I lost my best friend...”

Aziraphale felt a shiver run through him. He’d been so focused on, well, saving the world, he’d thought Crowley was only moping, but — the demon in front of him was outright traumatized, even though it had all turned out okay, and Aziraphale realizes he really must say something soon before Crowley jumps out of his skin in anticipation, which he might literally do and that would be quite a mess. 

“Oh, Crowley,” he says softly, uncertainly. He’s not entirely sure what to do with this information. 

Crowley looks straight at him, yellow eyes rimmed in red. 

“I can’t take this anymore, Aziraphale. I thought I could, I really did, I thought I could just wait, as long as it took.” His brows furrow, his fist clenches and unclenches on nothing at all, his shoulders shifting side to side. “More than anything, I suppose I thought this” — he gestures at the space between them — “was enough. If I could have this, I would take it. Whatever it was, whatever you would give me, that you kept letting me come back to you, it was more than I ever thought I’d get, so I never let myself want anything more.” He rolls his eyes, scrunches his nose. “At least, I bloody well tried. But when I thought I had to live in this world, to confront whatever happened next...for all eternity...without you...” He bites his lip, his nostrils flaring, and Aziraphale’s mind is going into overdrive. “The agony of that moment, Aziraphale. Of that infernal, eternal hour when I thought you were gone forever. It was worse than anything Heaven or Hell ever could have done to me, worse than torture, worse than holy water, worse than armageddon itself, that moment. It hasn’t left me.” He’s trembling, now. “And I suppose I don’t really know how to be around you without letting it show.”

Never has Aziraphale heard such a painful pause than when Crowley stops speaking just then and looks at him with damp, unguarded eyes. There aren’t any words that seem enough, though, but he knows every cruel second that passes in silence is hurting Crowley more, and all Aziraphale wants to do, all he’s ever really wanted to do, is stop Crowley from hurting, and his silence has done exactly that for far too long.

“I never thought about us being separated,” he says at last. Crowley scoffs.

“Must be nice.”

“No,” Aziraphale says firmly, the chaos in his head finally beginning to swirl into something coherent, into something close to a revelation. “I mean, I couldn’t. I couldn’t, you know I couldn’t have you destroying yourself, why do you think that is?”

“Because you are an angel and you can’t bear any destru—“

“No,” Aziraphale says, his voice soft. “Because I couldn’t bear to be without you, either.”

Crowley takes a moment before he looks up, with something horribly close to hope in his eyes, and Aziraphale feels something inside him break. From it, something new emerges, something that had been gestating for quite some time, hot and pure and wanting. 

“You said we weren’t friends,” Crowley says, his voice hardly louder than a whisper.

“I would have said anything to stop Hell from finding out you had an arrangement with me,” Aziraphale admits, “and besides, it scared me. It terrified me, because I was already being such a bad angel! I gave away my sword, I questioned the death of Christ, I agonized over the flood, and there I was, doing exactly what I wasn’t supposed to do, the one thing I had been fighting against since you joined me on that wall!”

Crowley’s eyes are wide, his fist still clenching and unclenching. 

“What’s that, Aziraphale?”

Aziraphale screws up his face in desperation, but he knows the truth is going to come out of him anyway, that any allegiance to who he thought he had to be burned away in the hellfire they would have used to destroy him, that there is nothing at all left keeping him from the truth and, it’s time he finally admits, there never really was anything there in the first place.

“Falling for you.” 

Crowley’s eyes have gone wide. Aziraphale, whose brain is full of a strange buzzing, actually sees the demon swallow, which is very odd indeed, as he has no need to, but Aziraphale watched the muscles in his neck strain anyway, focusing on this instead of the world that he’s just changed forever with those three damned (!) words, because it’s easier than confronting reality and also because the thing that’s been awoken in him very, very much enjoys watching Crowley’s throat...

“Do you mean that, Aziraphale?” Crowley’s eyes are dry now, and the hope in them unapologetically shines through, as does the blaze of what Aziraphale understands with a ferocious thrill, is hunger. “Don’t you say it if you don’t mean it.” 

“I mean it.” 

Crowley’s shifted closer now, and with Aziraphale’s knee up on the couch as he’s turned to him, their knees brush. Crowley’s hand is clenching again, but slower, something closer to anticipation. 

“Tell me how you mean it, angel. I need to be sure.” 

“I mean — I’ve been terrified of how much fondness I’ve had for you for a very long time!”

“Fondness.” Crowley repeats, his whole being sagging. 

“Well, yes! I mean you must understand, even though we were supposed to be beings of love, that certainly wasn’t supposed to happen!” Aziraphale goes on quickly. “I was meant to loathe everything you are, to wish to eradicate you from the earth, and I — I never could! I never, ever did, it’s like I didn’t know how, and then — I kept telling myself it’s what you do, you tempt!” Aziraphale’s speaking quite loudly now, trying to get it all out. “That that’s all it was, that I only wanted to be around you, to walk this world with you, to share all the frivolous devastations of humanity with you because you were here and you were tempting me, and I was weak for it — so many times I was meant to stop you but I found myself alongside you instead — but — but the more we did it, the more it simply felt like — well, the right thing to do — and that didn’t make any sense because of course it wasn’t, but it felt right, to me...”

Crowley’s moved closer, without Aziraphale noticing when he’s done it. Aziraphale can feel the warmth pressing off him, for a cold-blooded demon Crowley’s simply shimmering with a sweaty sort of glow, something terribly familiar and wanton, and Aziraphale realizes that this, this is what love feels like when Crowley does it, something antithetical to what he’s supposed to be but a part of him nonetheless, just like Aziraphale’s longing, so much a part of them it’s actually tangible, at least...when they’re together...

“So what is it you want from me, Aziraphale?” Crowley asks. His voice is deep in his throat, and Aziraphale feels drunk from it, dizzy with desire he’s still not used to letting himself feel.

“Everything,” he says at last, his voice as soft as prayer. 

The demon looks at him and there’s no mistaking his expression now, it’s a love that transcends the kind humans can feel, something entirely encompassing and terrifyingly, blessedly eternal.

“Then take it,” Crowley hisses in his most snakelike voice, and Aziraphale understands; this is the last thing Crowley needs to make sure Aziraphale means it, means all of it: he won’t make the first move. Or, rather, he’s already made many, many moves, and if Aziraphale wants to escalate this, Crowley’s going to wait for the angel to show him exactly how far.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but Aziraphale has never done anything like this before. He parts his lips, realizing he’s never thought about the mechanics of this particular function. I don’t know what I’m doing! he thinks wildly, but then it doesn’t matter, because Crowley knows that, Crowley knows him, and he does, in fact, want this very fucking badly.

Aziraphale leans closer, seizes Crowley’s hair, closes the space between them, once and for all. 

Crowley’s mouth on his feels better than he ever allowed himself to imagine, thin lips parting, pressing against his own. There’s a moment of just reveling in the touch, in the shift of it all, and then, without breaking away, Crowley climbs into his lap, pushing him back against the couch and straddling him, his knees pushing into Aziraphale’s thighs and the heat of his love suddenly encompassing, utterly everywhere, and Aziraphale gives in to it. He moans into Crowley as the demon’s tongue slips into his mouth, tangles one hand into Crowley’s hair and holds him tight, letting his other hand find its way beneath the hem of Crowley’s shirt. 

“Everything, Crowley,” he gasps, pressing the words into Crowley’s mouth, “I want everything, I want all of you, always, always.” Crowley’s moved his head down to let his teeth scrape against Aziraphale’s throat, grinding his body into the angel’s lap, and Aziraphale has never wanted anything like this before, “not just — oh, fuck — not just your mouth or your body, but all of you, all of this, to be with you, to be myself with you, for you always to be honest with me, to be here with me, please — “

Crowley pulls away from Aziraphale’s throat, making the angel let out a little moan at the loss of the touch, and Aziraphale recognizes, dazed, that he has never, ever, ever seen the demon so dizzyingly happy. 

“Thank God,” says Crowley, and he leans back down to kiss his angel again.

*******

The nightmares haven’t stopped, not entirely. But now, when Crowley wakes in a sweat in the middle of the night, Aziraphale is right there to hold him close, kiss him, and tell him he’s not going anywhere.


End file.
